Mello Skincare

An Entrepreneurial Endeavor with Alpha Kappa Psi

When I joined Alpha Kappa Psi in Fall 2016, I wanted to see entrepreneurial spirit within our business-minded group. We had the opportunity to join committees to expand on our real life experience, from sponsorship, to marketing, to consulting, philanthropy, and more. None were focused on entrepreneurship, though. My brothers and I created a new committee to spark that interest, the Entrepreneurship Committee (known as Rho Innovate).

With a team of 6 passionate brothers, we defined the goal for Rho Innovate: to give our community the power to innovate - without the risk.

In a business fraternity, start-ups had a mediocre reputation; they’re for “techies” or only mobile-app related. We wanted to erase the idea that entrepreneurship had to do be technical - it could be any product or service. And so… we dived into skincare.

But that’s not the whole story. We pivoted along the way. We started with creating our company, Mello, to make chocolate. We learned how to make chocolate (seriously, even temper it). We learned from experts in the area, experts who had chocolatiers in France, and practiced with professional grade equipment. The goal was to create snackable chocolate; you can eat as much as you want without the negative health effects… And it didn’t work. We did have fun with it, though - during one of our meetings, we sat on the ground, created thin layers of chocolate, added in a variety of toppings (dried fruit, nuts, pretzels, etc), and did a taste test — a memory I will cherish.

Our ideas were all over the place, and one thing I learned was when to persevere, and when to pivot. We didn’t have a concrete business plan, there were too many competitors in the industry, the barrier to entry was relatively high (FDA standards).. It was hard to get the ball rolling - we didn’t really have that passion. But we had to remember our goal wasn’t to make the next Facebook. The goal was to show our community that entrepreneurship is an option, and it still is. We finally decided to pivot when someone said our company name “Mello” sounded like a skincare product.. Yup, that was literally the reason we switched to skincare.

After months of skincare research, user research, surveying, interviewing, and data mining, we created Mello, a powder-based face mask with different properties to deep clean the skin and help moisturize.

FINAL PRODUCT

These pictures were taken by Aria Cha and Cynthia He.

Marketing strategy

As marketing lead, I worked with two people to create a story by Mello skincare: the untouched series. The mission is to highlight natural beauty, to make people feel beautiful in their natural skin. We photographed just that, visualized in the banner photo below (to the right). We included a booklet and offered photoshoots to anyone who wanted to be pictured; we wanted to market our product to the people, for the people, by the people.

We also maintained a Facebook page with events of our pop-ups and an Instagram feed to connect with our target audience, as well as sold out and made a profit. We streamlined the process to create a company from nothing but passion, and hopefully gave our community the power to take risks.